FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Combining the approaches of historical scholarship and post-structural, feminist psychoanalytic theory to women's poetry in the late 16th and early 17th-century, Subjectivity and Women's Poetry in Early Modern England makes a unique contribution to the field. It is the first full-length study to apply post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic theory exclusively to early modern women's poetry." "The strength of this study is that it merges analysis of socio-political constructions affecting early modern women poets writing in England with the psychoanalytic insights, specific to women as subjects, of post-Lacanian theorists Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Rosi Braidotti. McGrath employs these psychoanalytic theories of linguistic subjectivity to discuss its production in poetry written by English women in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Her study offers a way to understand the psychological and material conditions and theoretical strategies of women's writerly opportunities as they were formulated and validated in their own textual testimonies. Because the social and political construction of the female body materially supports the sense of subjectivity which does or does not ease the way to writing, and because the always gendered ideology of literacy most closely impinges on women's writing potential, two chapters accumulate and analyze evidence of women's participation in the cultural construction of their bodies and their reading and writing." Readings of Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, and Aemilia Lanyer demonstrate the different means by which these poets, contributing to and immersed in bodily language constructions pertinent to the female writer, inscribed themselves as subjects in their poetic texts. Moving beyond the re-discovery and descriptive analyses of early modern women's texts, McGrath here attains a new level of sophisticated theoretical analysis of Renaissance Englishwomen's poetry.

SYNOPSIS

As well as discussing the work of English women poets of the 16th- 17th century, McGrath (West Chester U. of Pennsylvania), who uses a psychoanalytic and feminist theoretical approach, provides lengthy analysis of the status, treatment, condition, and apprehension of women in the early modern period. When she turns to specific literary criticism in the book's second half, McGrath focuses on the work of Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, and Aemilia Lanyer. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

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